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Ok, Custom Dynamic Stamps, I hear ya!

Sorry, but, I get asked this question almost every day! How do I create a custom stamp in Acrobat 8 Professional or Acrobat 3D Version 8?

How do I add my user name and date like in the standard stamps in Acrobat, or better put, How do I create a custom dynamic stamp.

Well, that is the million dollar question today. I was recently at one of the largest EPC firms and that question came up in every group I talked to. I feel your pain, and understand, this is a feature that we need to add to Acrobat 8 Professional and Acrobat 3d version 8 (Hopefully we can get it spec’d for Acrobat 9).

First off let me preface this with if you work for a large company, you need to comply with the internal standards for stamps used today. Stamps have legal implications. So, please check with your standards committee or IT group before going willy nilly into stamp creation.

Second note that this is NOT a supported work flow by Adobe and just a cool tip and trick, so please don’t call customer support if you mess up your stamps.

Ok, now that I have covered my backside, let’s jump in. I’ll show you how to do this, but let’s walk before we run.

Creating your Custom Stamp

First off, take a step back and think about it, when creating your new whoopee wow stamp, don’t go and scan in your stamp and have a 2 Mb file. Because when you start applying this monster you will be adding 2 Mb each time! Use a graphic program such as Photoshop or Illustrator. I personally use Illustrator because it is vector graphics, and it will save and work natively as PDF files, and the Illustrator .ai file will compress very well into a PDF and the PDF will stay a vector file! Also they scale very well when applied as stamps! Here is a view of my stamp in Illustrator, and a file size comparison:

As you can see, the PDF file is 1/3 the size of the Illustrator file and still a vector file.

Ok so let’s get to the steps for creating a custom stamp. Here, I have turned on my Comment & Markup tool bar by right mouse clicking on the tool bars and clicking on show Comment & Markup toolbar. This in not a necessary step, I just did it here for clarity.

Ok here we go:

Select the stamp tool button and go down to and select Create Custom Stamp… you will see the Select Image for Custom Stamp dialogue box shown below

Now select Browse and select your stamp

Once up see your stamp in the preview window hit OK. You will see the diagloge box shown below, if you have never created a custom stamp before create a new Category by typing a new name in the category pull down. Note that it will not say to type here for new category but just trust me on this one! Give you new stamp a name, and if you used PDF then Uncheck the Down sample stamp to reduce file size; if you use a TIFF or BMP file or a native file format then leave this checked.

Click OK

Now let’s check your new stamp by inserting it into your file. When you go to the insert stamps location you will see your new category listed and your new fancy stamp listed.

Pretty cool huh! Well we are have way there, LOL! So far it has been pretty straight forward, from here on out this is a procedure that is not supported by Adobe, so please if you don’t get what you wanted do not call customer support, but add it as a comment here on the blog site.

Adding the dynamic gizmo to your custom stamps

Ok here is the part you must take a bit slowly because it is not 100% straight forward.

Go to your LOCAL Settings and go to this directory. In my case it is the following:

In that directory there will be one or many (based on how many custom stamps you have) very strangely named files, in my case the file name is; NsZpGu5eHSwLlyVa5gRhsC.pdfif you want to change the name do it now! If you do it later this will probably fail!

Now sort by date and open the newest file in Acrobat 8 Professional.

Ok good do you have it open? It’s ok I can wait………Ok now let’s move to another directory that is equally hard to find, this will be where the stamps that ship with Acrobat 8 Professional are stored.

Now, make sure you go down a couple of pages in Dynamic.PDF till you see a stamp that has By:foozle at 8:50pm, Aug 25,2004, the one I choose was the REVIEWED Stamp

Now if you have never used the forms technology in Acrobat this may get tricky just go slow and follow along. In Acrobat 8 Professional and Acrobat 3D Version 8 you can go to the Tools menu pull down and then select Forms on the fly out select Edit Layout your stamp should look like this below

Select the field, when it turns red, Right Mouse Click and select Copy.

Then switch to your custom stamp and paste, you can move it to the correct location and then scale it up or down by dragging the corner areas.

Close and save your new custom stamp, do not use Save As, just hit Save.

Now let’s insert our new Dynamic Custom Stamp!

And there you go a Dynamic Custom stamp!

Whew, that one was a bit tricky and a little more technical, but something I get asked about this at least 3 times a week!

Ok all, I hope that helps, if you have any other burning questions please add them to the comments below!